July 2009

Instead of angling for a record deal, Canyon Cody sent his demo to the U.S. government and applied for a Fulbright scholarship. After he was awarded the prestigious grant, Cody headed to Spain with rapper/producer Gnotes and built a recording studio above a flamenco guitar shop in Granada. Over the next year, the Gnawledge Records duo collaborated with 16 local musicians, recording their open-invite jam sessions during the daily afternoon siesta.

The result is Granada Doaba (available for free download at www.gnawledge.com), an immigrant-powered mash-up of traditional music and progressive hip-hop. While most musicians make records to sell, Gnawledge recorded the album as an educational experiment in multicultural collaboration. With the entire CD offered online as open-source material free to be remixed by global MCs and DJs, Granada Doaba demonstrates how even “world music” still usually has its roots in a local scene.

“There’s a lot of communal loitering in Granada, people just hanging out in the streets together playing music for free” Cody explains. “And that’s what I tried to capture with the album: I wanted to make local music, not world music.”

Each track on Granada Doaba flows from centuries of confluent immigration that have produced both convivencia—the peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain—and violent conflict. When the Spanish Inquisition forced non-Catholics to flee Granada in 1492, persecuted Muslim families fled to the mountains above the city, where they intermixed with the newly arrived Gypsy community. The resulting hybrid is a unique style of flamenco indigenous to Granada with strong Arab roots (“La Senda del Abuelo”). The album traces the evolution of the Spanish guitar through five generations of the Habichuela family, Granada’s epic flamenco dynasty, whose youngest star Juan embodies the vibrant future of the tradition (“Flamencología”).

Gnotes and Cody conducted their ethnomusicology research with the guidance of two older musicians—flamenco guitarist Juan Miguel Carmona and Arabic oud (fretless lute) player Uzman Almerabet. But in the end, it was through their collaboration with the young community of immigrant artists that Gnawledge was able to experience first-hand the difficulties and triumphs of border-crossing, genre-bending musical fusion.

Granada today booms with the same multicultural spirit as it did half a millennium ago: North African immigrants coming to Spain to reclaim their lost Moorish heritage; bohemian wanderers in love with the city’s laid-back vibe; Latin Americans looking for first-world jobs from their former colonizers; dedicated Japanese flamenco aficionados searching for duende. Many of the musicians on the album initially came to Granada only for a brief visit, but ended up staying for years, bewitched by the spirit of southern Spain. And like their predecessors centuries before, they brought their sonic sensibilities with them.

As Cody and Gnotes explored the scene, they realized that it would be nigh impossible to capture Granada’s diversity in a traditional recording. In the end, it was Gnotes’ talent and experience as a sample-based hip-hop producer that allowed the group to actively listen and engage the soundscape around them, “Hip-hop is omnivorous. There are no rules that govern hip-hop like they have in flamenco or Arabic music,” Cody explains. “Older genres have reified into these fairly rigid structures. Hip-hop has fewer rules, or we are still discovering them. You can incorporate so many different elements and still be live inside the walls of hip-hop.”

These elements came from chance meetings, magic moments, and off-the-cuff jam sessions with local celebrities like Richard Dudanski, an English drummer who was in punk bands with both Joe Strummer before The Clash and Johnny Rotten after The Sex Pistols. Dudanksi who now lives in Granada and owns one of the city’s best-loved bars, contributes polyrhythmic percussion to “El Manisero de Potemkin,” a spirited take on Spanish colonialism and a piece of Cody’s personal history, his Cuban heritage.

Japanese flamenco guitarist and long-time Granada resident Hidetomo Nambu painstakingly recorded his accompaniment to the heart-wrenching vocal sample on “No Te Rebeles,” a controversial re-interpretation of an orthodox flamenco song. After hundreds of hours of recording with the Al-Tarab Ensemble, Granada’s premier performers of traditional Arabic music, Cody and Gnotes finally captured a moment of pure old-school funk as the group accompanied a beautiful dancer, Griselda Qamar, while the clacking beads of her dress shimmy audibly in the song’s final mix along with the oud and qanun (zither).

Vinyl is history, as Cody and Gnotes discovered digging through the record bins of Granada’s pawnshops in search of sounds. “If you want to know the history of a city,” Cody chuckles, “check out its pawnshops.” With turntables, samplers, and drum machines, Gnotes built new digital rhythms out of dusty vinyl, producing the skeleton beats that were eventually layered with live instrumentation

For Gnawledge, sampling opens new opportunities for musical participation with pre-recorded sound. This resonates beautifully with Spain’s musical culture, where listeners rarely sit idly by. “In Granada, as soon as you can clap your hands, you’re part of the band.” Cody smiles. “I love the participatory aspect of flamenco, and hip-hop.”

Gnawledge is opening up the project to further possibilities, permutations, and participation by offering each individual track (drums, bass, guitar, etc.) of every song for free download, with an invitation to DJs and rappers to take Granada Doaba in new directions. Already, tracks like “Menudo Jaleo” have sparked vocal versions by a multilingual multitude of international MCs.

“We don’t want just one version of each song, but dozens, based on Jamaican dancehall’s riddim method,” Cody explains. “Every vocalist does their own version, and the court of public opinion decides which is the best and that one becomes the ‘official’ version everyone remembers. Right now, we have remixes in French, Arabic, Spanish, German—from a guy in Argentina, believe it or not—and English.” These reinterpretations and remixes are included in a bonus disc along with limited edition hand-made CD liner notes.

Though the album may be deeply local, the next step for Gnawledge is to take the sound global, which is why an open-source, digital download approach is the perfect fit. “The internet is the only place where global music exists,” Cody believes. This is more than just a distribution method. It’s a metaphor for what lies at the heart of the project, the ideas that took Cody and Gnotes to Granada in the first place: the power of music to build communities from disparate and far-flung cultures.

As the whole project is based on collaboration and collective discovery—right down to the relatives enlisted to craft handmade CD booklets from remixed thrift store atlases—“we want to encourage this to be an ongoing collaborative process,” Cody reflects. “Someone in Helsinki can download it and then upload their contribution. This is an unfinished project. I hope it continues to sprout new life.”

Hit Holland Tunnel traffic, and decked out like a Technicolor Bedouin is John Kruth, conducting the blaring horns of frustrated drivers with a pencil and channeling a hybrid symphony of New York noise. Next appears the slyly unassuming Jeff Greene, whose conventional attire belies a profound first-hand knowledge of esoteric overtone flutes, Arabic scales, and all things ending in “-stan.” We’re not in Soho anymore.

Welcome to Tribecastan, a country without borders tucked away in a corner of downtown Manhattan. This country of the mind is home to Uighur mountaineers and Croatian zookeepers. Drum and fife corps march alongside Slovakian shepherds with six-foot-tall pipes and Indonesian scales warp rock mandolins. Strange Cousin captures the ancient future of this imaginary land where Swedish nykelharpas and Pakistani taxi horns can live together harmoniously both in peace and mayhem.

Tribecastan was founded during a particularly raucous celebration of World Jug Band Day (also known as Labor Day), when the washboards and tubs turned into a parade of “radical trad music,” as Kruth calls it, on the streets of Tribeca. “We knew we had to keep doing this.” So Kruth, known for his “banshee mandolin” playing with punk bands like the Meat Puppets and the Violent Femmes, united with ethnomusicological whiz Greene to found a new musical nation.

The caravan soon picked up rock-solid Ween bassist David Dreiwitz; Steve Turre, conch shell virtuoso better known as the trombonist for the Saturday Night Live band; the eerie power of the ex-Be Good Tanyas’ Jolie Holland and her voice and box-fiddle; and ethno-jazz reed master Matt Darriau of Klezmatics fame.

If Tribecastan had patron saints, they would be the least recognized folk musicians in the world: “People like Don Cherry and Yusef Lateef were just as much folk musicians as jazz musicians. They are the epitome of what we’re striving for,” Kruth explains. “They took folk melodies from around the world and improvised on them,” an overlooked facet revealed on songs like “Mopti,” a banjo-laced cover of the Cherry tune based on a Malian village song. Or on “Yusef’s Motif,” where the peculiar resonance of an African flute and the overtones of a Slovakian shepherd’s pipe pay homage to mentor and inspiration Lateef.

The same principle applies to Tribecastani original “Dancing Girls.” “We took a Tajik melody, then made it our own and added a Bulgarian kaval (shepherd’s flute) and an Afghani rubab (short-necked lute) and some Moroccan drums like the darbuka. And of course, there’s a plucked mandocello doing a rock thing,” laughs Greene.

"It’s a natural sonic evolution of where urban folk music is going,” Greene continues. “How can you ignore all these influences? How can you synthesize them organically, so they sound like the music belongs to you, to one place or person. That is what we are trying to accomplish. We are making music that has meaning. It's an honest evolution of these influences.”

Tribecastan’s influences are as freewheeling and wide-ranging as their instrument menagerie, but they all flow from what Kruth and Greene feel is the deep inexplicable resonance they’ve experienced in the streets of Split, Croatia or in the melodies of the Sahara, where Greene spent a season hitchhiking as a teenager.

Every time Kruth returns with his partner to Croatia, “I hear these Eastern European melodies, and people tell me they sound Jewish. I didn’t grow up listening to klezmer, so maybe it’s the echo of my DNA.” This echo deeply resounds in songs like “The Flower (that I Placed at my Ancestor’s Grave Spontaneously Burst into Flame with their Appreciation),” which features Klezmatic clarinetist Matt Darriau, and in a shout-out to a deceased relative “Tonko the Zookeeper” that gets wildly Tribecastanified with a dulcet Uzbek dutar (strummed lute) and a curious Moldovan kaval flute discovered at a French convention of thousands of hurdy-gurdy players—where else?

A tape Greene bought during a ride in the mountains of Indonesia sparked “Sunda Sunday.” The pentatonic melody Greene found intriguing called out for Turre’s conch stylings, as well as a Trinidadian steel drums. “Raphaela” started out as a song Greene picked up in Havana, with Kruth adding some klezmeresque touches for an out-and-out “Juban” jam. And “Otha’s Blues,” a blues riff once played by Othar Turner’s fife and drum corps, only needed a towering Slovak overtone fujara flute to gain a full Tribecastani pedigree).

Inspiration often strikes far closer to home, right on Tribecastan’s borders, with the phone number of a Uighur musician in the remote region of Brooklyn or a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam in Lower Manhattan. “I was walking down by the Holland Tunnel, and everyone is just jammed in traffic. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket and started conducting this traffic jam,” Kruth recalls. Even the most belligerent New York drivers couldn’t help but smile and allowed this strange figure to direct their horn blasting. “It was wonderful, something Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman would have gotten a kick out of; a wild hurricane of sound.” Kruth would know, having played with Ornette and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Back in the recording studio this moment later became “Tribecastani Traffic Jam,” a free jazz explosion flowing from loosy-goosy, point and wave conducting. “Something amazing happened during that piece. It was like mental telepathy,” Greene explains. “Everyone was on the same wavelength.”

Nailing down the multifarious culture of Tribecastan—or even getting it to hold still for half a second—is a tall order. Kruth and Greene have purposefully aimed to tear down the clichéd boundaries between world, folk, and jazz and rejecting all genres as adequate definitions.

“I like to think of us as avant garde doing something new. But what are we doing? Just like Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of my favorite bands, we compose and play Ancient Future music. Sun Ra would play music from the roots to the fruits and music from next Tuesday that you haven’t heard yet,” muses Kruth. “I like to think we are playing music you haven’t heard yet.”

Tattered stamps and postmarks from disparate east European locales. Barely legible scribblings from anonymous correspondents of yesteryear. An old-country wedding band of mustachioed men in bowlers crowding around a long-gone shtetl cottage, their instruments held with pride. A serious little Polish-Jewish boy learning to play the violin... These images on the cover of Beyond the Pale’s Postcards capture lost moments of a once vibrant Eastern European musical world, as much a historical memory as a mythical ideal.

But this innovative Toronto-based acoustic group seeks to do more than simply put the pieces back together. They reframe this vanished world on Postcards, re-forging fragments into a distinct Jewish-Balkan twang that flows from virtuoso musicianship, group improvisations, new compositions, and an eclectic palette of North American sounds, from jazz and rock to bluegrass and funk. Live music fans can catch their approach this June in New York, Amherst, Princeton, and Montreal, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on June 15, 2009.

“Our music coalesces around a kind of amorphous and scrambled geography” explains Eric Stein, group founder and mandolin maestro. “[MSOffice1] Each song is like a snapshot, a postcard from one or another of the far-flung realms in our eclectic musical universe.”

It’s a universe carved out of both the here and now, and the there and then, a wild mash-up of traditions: Jewish and Romanian folk tunes, contemporary Yiddish poetry set to timeless Roma melodies, odd-meter Serbian rhythms, slinky acoustic grooves, and intricate chamber-style songcraft. Just as pioneer mandolin player David Grisman coined “Dawg Music” to define his genre-twisting string band music, Beyond the Pale defies the labels usually slapped on groups exploring Eastern European Jewish music. “What we do is in many ways a lot like Dawg Music…but with pierogies,” Stein laughs.

All kidding aside, Beyond the Pale do not take tradition lightly, though they interpret it freely. ”We have our roots in a lot of folk traditions, but we try not to fetishize authenticity,” says Stein. He and Dutch-Canadian clarinetist Martin van de Ven bring Jewish music bonafides to the group through careful study of scratchy 78’s of old-time klezmer bands, and copious research into obscure musical manuscripts collected a century ago by east European ethnographers.

That foundation is shaken and stirred by violinist Alekasandar Gajić, accordionist Milos Popović, and percussionist Bogdan Djukić, a trio of Serbian virtuosi who, as Stein puts it, are flexible and fearless. “These guys have an incredible knack for intertwining classical ideas with gritty folk energy and even pop aesthetics.” Held together by the pulsating groove and jazzy swing of bassist Bret Higgins, it all blends effortlessly into one. The group’s complex arrangements leave ample room for improvisation and intricate dynamic flow, all the while maintaining a rare depth for such an eclectic fusion. “We strive to make it about more than just taking elements superficially from different world music traditions and slamming them together haphazardly.”

Beyond the Pale’s nimble flexibility and adventurousness shine on originals like “Back to the Beginning,” a darkly urgent, “new music”-flavored composition Gajić wrote during a terrible night of bombing in Belgrade, and on Stein’s “Split Decision,” a tour de force of group improvisation that climaxes in a soaring, Santana-like percussion-driven frenzy.

Their soulfulness comes across in more contemplative pieces, like van de Ven’s “Two Are,” Gajic’s “Solution,” and in the slow and sonorous “Meditation,” an arrangement by Stein of a Hasidic nigun (wordless melody). “I got a hold of this four-part vocal score and re-arranged it like a chamber music piece for our instruments,” says Stein. “It has a longing and a sadness to it, and it felt right to dedicate it to my late brother David,” who had originally introduced him to the world of Yiddish music over a decade ago.

Beyond the Pale also looks to some unexpected sources for neglected and quirky repertoire. In the case of the delicious romp “Turkish Delight” the source is the legendary ninety-something cocktail pianist Irving Fields, known best for his ’50s-era Bagels and Bongos LPs, where Latin rhythms met Jewish melodies. The prolific songwriter has also spent a great deal of his career working cruise ships, compiling on his many ocean voyages “Melody Cruise Around the World,” a collection of musical odes to ports of call the world over, recorded on an old-school cassette tape recorder. Never released commercially, Stein got his hands on the tape from his friend and sometime collaborator Socalled, a rebel hip hop beatmeister. Intrigued by Fields’ tribute to Istanbul, Stein decided to give it “the Beyond the Pale treatment.” “On the recording, Irving is playing a Casio keyboard with this super cheesy flute sound, it’s really hilarious, but there’s an amazing composition there. I transcribed his performance, made a few adjustments, then brought it to the band and we created a group arrangement,” Stein smiles. “It’s one of the pieces on the CD I’m most thrilled about.”

The band’s deep respect for its elders also sees them mining the repertoire of other musical mentors. “Anthem,” for example, is based on an upbeat, clarinet-crazed bulgar from the repertoire of the late Moldovan clarinetist and Jewish cultural lifeline German Goldenshteyn, with whom band members had the opportunity to study. Emigrating to the US in the mid-’90s, Goldenshteyn’s handwritten notebook of eight hundred unique songs collected over his years playing in the Red Army and for Bessarabian weddings, has become a kind of new testament for aspiring musicians in North America. “That tune was his biggest hit, his anthem really,” Stein recalls. “I feel privileged to have known German, and in playing music we learned directly from him I think we’re honoring an important relationship between older carriers of tradition and younger musicians.”

Indeed, that honor appears to flow in both directions between the band and some of its more esteemed fans and musical collaborators, including the legendary singer/actor Theodore Bikel. The group will perform at Carnegie Hall on June 15 in a spectacular 85th birthday tribute concert described by Bikel as “a night of music with some of my nearest and dearest friends.” Says Stein, “it’s been a thrill for us working with Theo over the last couple years. What an honor to be asked by him to perform for this incredible milestone, and at Carnegie Hall no less.”

Another source of pride: the band’s commitment and staying power. “So many bands of our ilk have either revolving personnel or just don’t stay together. But we’ve been at this for over a decade with virtually the same lineup and the band is so much about the unique personalities, not just plugging musicians into parts,” Stein notes. “The shorthand and repartee we have with each other takes the music to another level.”

Aphrodesia isn’t afraid to turn everything on its head and send it through the distortion pedals of their own sensibility. A slang term for Shanghai hookers becomes a tribute to women’s value; wall-shaking amps create the perfect distortion for an age-old lamellophone; a cross-continent move spells inspiration not band demise; and a new-found freedom turns dedicated Afrobeat orthodoxy into free-wheeling fusion.

Precious Commodity maps how far the high-energy eleven-piece Bay Area band has traveled from Afrobeat worshipers to innovative and mature collective, and points to a radical new direction for North America’s burgeoning Afrobeat scene. Where once careful attention to the tradition sparked by Nigeria’s Fela Kuti reigned supreme, now musicians are madly pursuing their own visions for the music—and creating traditions of their own.

Groups from Aphrodesia to Nomo to Antibalas side project Ocote Soul Sound are reclaiming Afrobeat’s outspoken political platform and transforming it into intimate personal statements and more subtle critiques and explorations of American life. “We learned the term ‘Special Girl’ from a friend who had just returned from Shanghai on business,” explains singer and songwriter Lara Maykovich. “He was offered, a special girl, a prostitute. The song is the story of this trans-continental sex trade, a kind of mockery of this old game where man thinks he is winning. Power and money are evidently not the final quench. The thirst is satisfied by a more precious commodity. Sex, our most powerful possession and that which connects us to the unstoppable nature that man will never control. We began to think about the West's misconceptions on what is of value. The fear-driven mass of consumption, our denial of death that obstructs us from seeing what is truly precious.”

The personal approach also translates into new musical dimensions. “Sonically, our music has become much more varied than in the past. And this album broadens and strengthens what we have been building on,” recounts Aphrodesia bassist and songwriter Ezra Gale. “It was a conscious decision, really getting more creative and going for different sounds, discovering a much more diverse palette of instruments and sonic surprises.”

The group’s palette has expanded to include studio high jinks and the once verboten guitar solo. Inspired by Konono No. 1’s unwittingly revolutionary rethinking of the thumb piano, Gale took a musical idea that came to him while strolling through the overjoyed Mission District on Obama’s election, had singer Lara Maykovich play an mbira she had picked up in Zimbabwe, and then ran it through a huge bass cabinet and three guitar amps cranked so loud the studio’s walls shook (“November 5 I & II”).

“For a long time we have had two guitar players, but a rule of no guitar solos,” Gale notes. “There’s just no room for them in Afrobeat’s interlocking guitar parts, and we wanted to respect the tradition.” The longing to respect the music they loved took the band a few years ago on a wild bus tour across Togo, Benin, and Nigeria in a dizzying series of car chases, cassette bribes, and finally, an unforgettably warm reception at Afrobeat heir apparent Femi Kuti’s Lagos club. The experience solidified Aphrodesia’s sound, built on members’ past sojourns in Ghana and Cuba, that melded Afrobeat and Yoruba chants to the orisha spirits (“Ayala” and “Caminando”).

“As lyricists we carefully consider our invocations and intentionally apply them to our current political world struggles and our own fractured American reality,” explains Maykovich. “Since the voice of suffering is universal and passion is interchangeable, we don’t consider this a borrowed tradition. It’s one of the many traditions of mystery spiritual being have originated from.”

With their African mecca behind them, the band was ready to take the next step, which included lifting the long-standing guitar solo ban. “It was really funny: We played this one gig a redneck bar in woods near Santa Cruz, and the sound guy, as he was packing up, said ‘I ain’t never seen a band with two guitarists and no guitar solos.’ On this album we have three, and they are all awesome,” Gale smiles. “To us, it was just another symptom of us opening up and looking for different things.” Things like a noise guitar solo jolting through the pop smoothness of “Think/Suffer” where guitarist Mike Abraham strives to “avoid any and all notes,” Gale laughs.

Aphrodesia has expanded geographically as well as musically, with several members relocating from the Bay Area to New York. The move had an unexpected effect: Instead of undermining the band’s work, they found that it opened up their music to new post-production approaches and a new Big Apple vibe. “We had something we haven’t had before, a diversity of feedback and viewpoints in the studio, because in New York, all these talented people will just stop by the studio and listen,” people like Gale’s friends from the Blue Man Group who gave Gale input on several tracks. “It’s a product of working somewhere where you have to drive like California versus New York, where you walk down the block and bump into people,” Gale muses. The change of scene and long-distance music making—an amazingly seamless process thanks to MP3s—has brought Aphrodesia’s creativity into sharp focus.

This creativity still embraces the grooves that moved Aphrodesia from day one. Straight-up Afrobeat goodness overflows on “Merit Badge,” a tribute to the band’s humorous praise of members who receive imaginary merit badges for figuring out how to fix the tour bus or managing to give a stellar performance in the throes of severe illness. “Friday Night,” a palm wine song of frustrated love, came to the band from Obuobi Ashuog, the guitarist for Ghanaian friends Kusun, who takes a solo on the track.

Yet old orthodoxy and new spins merge on Precious Commodity. The funk and r&b call to wake up to the world around you, “Make Up Your Mind,” mixes Yoruba and Afro-Cuban chants with English lyrics and a guitar solo run through a whirling Leslie speaker salvaged from a Hammond organ. “By the Iron” winks at prog rock by adding lush strings to a Malian song and English incantation interwoven by Maykovich.

Aphrodesia’s new twist on a beloved approach shines brightest on the intro and outro tracks—“November 5”—that frame the album and feature the distorted mbira. The reworking of the track and its transformation in the New York studio where Gale put the finishing touches on the album represent a meaningful departure for the group. “I’m fascinated by the prospect that a song is not necessarily finished when it’s played and recorded. Aphrodesia has been more of a straight-ahead band, but this track is a different way to use the studio, a different way to think about recorded music that’s all around us now,” Gale reflects.

“I think because we are a younger white band, we felt like we needed to prove ourselves. We really wanted to do things right and give the music respect, and going to Africa was part of that,” explains Gale. “We feel like we have done that, though of course we’re always learning. But there is a feeling that we have gone down that path of trying to do everything authentically, now it’s time to embrace our own sound.”